Christian McCrea

Some thoughts triggered about Play Time by a recent article on videogames by Miguel Sicart. I won’t be responding to the article’s main points but I wanted to touch on its reading of this important film. One quote from Sicart:

The actors appear, following straight lines, turning with sharp 90 degrees angles, respecting what the architecture tells them to do. Slowly, though, things change, until the film ends with an exhibition of fluidity, live, and beautiful curves. 

Fluidity through mass choreography, of course. The film works by dint of a considerable technical achievement and part of the joy of the film is pure spectacle - that is, mass ornament. Years ago, film theorist Lee Hilliker:

If the overly cheery and rather pasted-on transformation of the urban environment fails in its lighthearted attempt at conversion to an optimistic attitude toward the modernist city, though, it is due to the convincing weight of the grey, wrap-around monolith of the film’s first half. When this presence changes from a looming, disorientating locus of shifting boundaries and identity confusion into a balloon-filled quasi circus, it is as if a powerful human character had undergone an unmotivated last-minute metamorphosis from a quiescent but ever-present monster into a cheerful sidekick who, underneath it all, really has the hero’s best interests in mind.Not only does this seem as unlikely as a similar human about-face, but it also points up the fact that the mise-en-scène has become an all-encompassing, almost unnoticed, antagonist in the course of the film, while the very uniformity of the urban fabric, its complete lack of differentiation, has helped it slip effortlessly beneath the conscious attention of both spectators and characters.

Playtime (1967) is a massive achievement for a number of reasons; not the least of which was Tati’s commitment to total control over set design, lighting construction and the technical presence of the 70mm lens, around which the shape and nature of the architecture, the cut of the stone, the make-up, the camera rigs would all have to be completely re-thought. To tell what Sicart calls a story “how curves reassert themselves over straight lines, and how that reassertion is a process and a matter of beauty”, Tati manufactured a metropolis. It might have been built on rock and roll, but it was built.

“Tativille” was in every sense a virtual city, comprising city streets, an airport terminal, vast office areas, traffic zones - all built towards camera placements that were planned years in advance. To tell a story about human persistence in the face of urban alienation, Tati built a city, employed thousands, spent the most on a (French) film to date, and choreographed that freedom for months. 

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum rejects the notion that the film is purely about alienation in the urban environment, but rather constitutes a celebration.

 It directs us to look around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other, and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, activated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we both observe and perform…

This is no slight distinction. The city is the playground as well as the prison. The joy of playtime comes from seeing the silliness of the system shown up for what it is, but the system is still the site for the joy. 

So much has been said about the film, its barely worth going over. But if you haven’t seen it, see it.